Mix it up.

Mixed media is hot, and new digital effects continue to be more accessible everyday. Whether you’re adding motion, sound or layers of paint and paper to your work, mixing media creates interest. Both traditional and
non-traditional ingredients can spice up concepts, messages and visual impact. This approach engages the audience on more than one level, and allows artists and designers to be very clever in getting their point across and achieving their goals. For personal projects, try gluing string, dried plants, glitter or iconic paper images in a collage with digital photos. Accent with paint, pastels, pencil or ink, and you can transform almost anything into the unique and original. At work, try adding sound or motion files to your presentations and Web sites. Throw some "flash" in the pan with a product demo. Proceed with a fearless and open mind, remembering that sometimes less is more, and sometimes more is exactly what will make it kick.

Best regards,
Kim

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If you're like me, you thank your lucky stars for websites like www.hemera.com, because it does what you know you will never do: provide abundant access to professional photography, and organize images really well. In both of those departments, my skills hover somewhere below ordinary. If I take 40 or 50 photos, one or two are bound to be decent, and at that rate, my library would equal Hemera’s right about when the sun goes nova.

And one of these days, I’ll get around to cataloging, sorting, and organizing my digital photo collection… right after I clean out my inbox and defragment my hard drive. Yeah, right…

Fortunately, integrating photography into PowerPoint™ presentations requires neither of those two essential skills. All it takes is a willingness to look beyond the obvious and use a modicum of imagination. And believe me, anything you do to break out of the TITLE-BULLET-BULLET-BULLET mindset with your presentation slides is a good thing. Here are a few things to think about as you consider adding Hemera imagery to your work.

Make Sure There Is Context
If we've seen it once, we’ve seen it a million times, and if we see it one more time, we might have to hurt someone. We refer to the use of one of those presentation templates that comes canned from Microsoft and offers some nice photo of some nice scenery that has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand. Figure 1 shows this in ignominious fashion—does this company make helicopters? Does it offer twilight hang-gliding over the Pacific Ocean? Is it a meteorological survey station, and that’s why it chose a photo of Mother Nature?

Set aside the fact that this template has been used more times than the Boston Red Sox have failed to reach a World Series. Even if it were a fresh image, it would be ineffective due to its lack of context. If you want your audience to pay attention to your message, do not compel them to stop and wonder why you used the imagery that you did. Make sure that it fits.

So when we were tasked with making over the dreadful slide shown in Figure 2, we wondered what type of imagery we could use that implied "organizational competence." By searching under the keywords business and communication, we found the timeless image of a stack of papers all neatly collected on a desk pin. With a minimum amount of dredge removal, this slide could benefit enormously from this clean and simple image. All we did to create Figure 3 was place the image on the slide and then crop the right side a bit.

Backgrounds Must Stay in the Background
One of our pet peeves in PowerPoint presentations is use of background imagery that is so strong, it competes with the foreground content. If you're hoping to improve upon the background of a slide, one of the riskiest moves you can make is to choose a photo that you really like. The temptation is almost overwhelming to use it too prominently. If you like a photo that much, don’t put it in the background; a photo for a background must be willing to take a back seat.

That was the challenge before us with a makeover for the Executive Council of Homeowners, whose leader was giving a talk about curb appeal for a home. Figure 4 gives a pretty good idea of how dull these slides were, but we also knew that a straight corporate look would not go over well with the presenter, who strongly prefers a casual and informal approach.

When I think of homes and homeownership, I think of a roof over our heads—the roof is the quintessential symbol of owning a home. So it was obvious that the search was going to begin with the words roof and house. That search turned up over 100 images, including striking rooflines and beautiful homes.

And Figure 5 shows the problem with that. The more striking the photo, the worse it serves as a background. The higher the contrast the photo has, the more it inhibits readability. Too bad, because we really liked the first three.

Fortunately, PowerPoint offers a solution without the need for any other application. To make the photo more suitable as a background, take the following steps:

Create a rectangle across the entire slide.
Apply a deep brown color to it (or whatever color fits the mood of the photo).
Position it behind the text and just in front of the photo (the Move Backward command from the Draw menu is good for this).
Right-click the rectangle, choose Format AutoShape, and from the Colors and Lines tab of the dialog box, apply a bit of transparency to it.

The Preview button is handy for this operation, as you are trying to apply just enough transparency so that the photo begins to peek through a bit. The result, Figure 6, is a photo that is much more subdued, has fewer areas of sharp contrast, and is much more suitable as a background with text in front.

You can apply a similar technique to the Case Studies slide to make its imagery even more powerful. Figure 7 shows how a rectangle placed atop the photo, with a gradual degree of transparency applied, can better integrate the photo with the background.

Had we not known about transparent rectangles, we would have dismissed the roof photo as being unusable, and we might not have gotten maximum effectiveness out of the papers-on-the-pin image. It certainly pays to consider all of the creative options for using imagery. In conjunction with good image-editing and graphic-drawing software, PowerPoint offers many avenues of creativity.

Bio
Rick Altman has authored three books on PowerPoint and specializes in makeovers and presentation coaching for a broad spectrum of clients. He is the host of the PowerPoint Live User Conference, to be held Oct. 10-13 in San Diego, CA. Visit www.powerpointlive.com for details.

Tim Gill is the managing director of BigKick! Creations, a UK-based creative agency specializing in designing artwork for the film and music industries. "We regularly use high-quality stock photos in the creative process," he says. "Some stock agencies charge us for images on an individual basis, or insist that we email our requests over, or that we buy a whole CD's worth of images just to get the one or two that we actually require. I really prefer the AbleStock® way."

BigKick! Creations is a young and relatively small agency with a long list of satisfied clients. The four employees – three designers and a photographer – have spent the past five years designing covers, inlays and marketing collaterals for a wide array of DVD, CD, vinyl and CD-ROM projects. "We also create TV ads and author DVDs, including menu interactivity, but about 70% of our business is printed materials," says Tim from the BigKick! office in Tring, near London.

The company is firmly planted in the creative arts industry, so it’s not very surprising that BigKick! Creations is fully stocked with Macintosh® computers. "Not a PC in the house," as Tim Gill says with some pride. "All the applications we use are standard fare in professional design circles – we use Adobe® Photoshop® for image editing and Illustrator or Freehand for vector design. We recently moved from QuarkXPress® to Adobe InDesign® for our layout and we use [Apple’s] Final Cut Pro and DVD Studio Pro for DVD editing and authoring. We also use [Corel’s] Bryce for some 3D stuff."

When a new client approaches BigKick! Creations with a project proposal, it’s not uncommon for them to have a very specific creative brief with detailed instructions about layout and design. But according to Tim, "…a few projects down the road, they typically drop off the DVD or CD master, asking us to ‘do something’. Having your clients trust you in this way is great, and it often leads to unexpected and very innovative results."

Tim and his colleagues were recently asked to create the artwork for a Jimi Hendrix LP cover [figure 1]. Says Tim: "We found the original Hendrix image and saw in it a passing resemblance to a Titian painting and we decided to develop that concept further. We needed a picture frame, and found a suitable image on AbleStock.com [figure 2]."

"When it came to doing the reverse sleeve [figure 3], we wanted to give the effect that Hendrix has actually walked out of the painting, and we found the Hessian sack on AbleStock to use as the rough canvasback [figure 4]."

For the designers at BigKick! Creations, everything starts with the idea. If the idea requires original images, they will either shoot them themselves or ask the client to provide them. If the project requires stock photography, they go to AbleStock.com to find it.

Tim explains: "There are three main reasons why we signed up for a second year with AbleStock.com:

Speed - Once you have an AbleStock account, you can browse the collection very quickly and then download the high-resolution images straight away.
Cost - The annual subscription is a very reasonable one-off fee. You are then able to download 100 different high-resolution images per day if you wish.
Variety - Stock art collections can be a great starting point for even the most creative projects. We use them for everything from clouds to materials and textures, to people and places."

"Stock art cannot take the place of creativity, nor is it intended to, but if you have a creative mind and the ability to think laterally, it can be a very useful tool," says Tim Gill. "The stock art works really well for us on spin-off products too, such as catalog covers and point-of-sale materials."

BigKick! Creations has been asked to create packaging for a range of upcoming PC games on CD-ROM. "You might notice a sudden spike in downloads of images featuring tanks, space and chess," Tim Gill says with a smile.

Mats Lindeberg is Communications Manager at Hemera, and the Editor of Hemera News.

When I work for charities and non-profit agencies, I'm always looking for ways to reduce my costs, and the costs to my clients. Budgets are always a large concern because the money we're spending has been donated, so it's important that every penny is spent in a practical way. Using Hemera® Photo-Objects® 50,000 (on DVD), I can introduce high impact photography without the high price of stock photography.

I can remember when other companies charged the same amount for one object with clipping paths as Hemera does for 50,000 images bundled on CD-ROM or DVD. The images in the Hemera package are as good, if not better, than any stock photography I've used in the past at large ad agencies. Just because something costs a lot doesn't mean it's necessarily the best quality.

For the "You Can Make A Difference" project, Amnesty wanted to create a promotional Flash movie that would motivate people to learn more about Amnesty, and possibly encourage them to donate to the human rights organization. Using Photo-Objects images, I was able to quickly inject quality photography into the Flash piece. Because the images have no background, it was really easy to work with them in Photoshop, then export them to PNG files for import into Flash.

In this screen capture of the Flash movie, I used an old book to represent the names of people who were silenced. The book is a Hemera Photo-Objects image, and the blurred face is also an image from the same series.

I can't imagine how long it would have taken me to find an old book on a traditional stock photography site. Having found the one I wanted, I then would have had to remove the background in Photoshop (adding hours to the project). Using a Photo-Objects image instead, in a matter of minutes I had the desired effect with little pain.

The Photo-Objects image collection on DVD lets you find what you are looking for fast. You can type in a keyword to search for the image you want, and up comes hundreds of thumbnails matching your search. I really like this feature because often I'll find photos I never thought of using before, so it actually aids in the creative process. Since you already own all of the images, you can use anything that is in front of you - unlike some stock photo sites where you have to buy each one. I find that the Photo-Objects series has saved both me and my clients thousands of dollars. It has also become an essential tool in my war-chest of creative possibilities.

Hemera Photo-Objects image of book with blurred face of woman in Photoshop.

Screen capture of "Silenced" section of Amnesty Flash movie. Book in top left hand corner is a Hemera Photo-Objects image, as is the blurred image of the woman.

BIO
Kevin Airgid (www.airgid.com) has worked exclusively in interactive design since the inception of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser. He has created interactive media for Amnesty International, Bell Canada, Cadillac, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Chevrolet, Detroit Tigers, Lexus, Marriott Hotel, McGraw-Hill, Ford Mercury, Siemens, and Toyota. Kevin is the recipient of several national design awards, and has authored numerous books and articles in the field of Web design and interactivity.

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